Blood Brothers (39 page)

“You left that night. I never saw you again.
Until now.”

“Well, it was my house, and my father and
girlfriend were murdered. It was my father’s gun. At the time,
despite you running off on me like a little bitch, I felt the need
to protect you.” Holding the gasoline can with both hands, he
started dousing the wooden floor of the bedroom with generous
amounts of the highly combustible and flammable gasoline. “After
you took off, I wiped the gun clean, getting rid of your
fingerprints. I dealt with Shelia. Packed a bag, grabbed some cash
and was out of here.” He stopped with the gas for just a moment on
Michael’s side of the bed. “Do you have any idea where an
eighteen-year-old kid wanted for murder has to go to not get
arrested for double homicide?”

“No,” Michael admitted. And he didn’t really
care. But the gas really scared him. Michael didn’t truly fear
death, but for he and Stephanie to be burned alive, well, yes, that
was about as frightening as it got. The longer he could keep Jerry
talking, the more time he had to think of something to get them out
of this mess.

“Well, let’s just say some places I stayed
made the cell I would have ended up in for the killings, not look
very bad at all. I had to earn a living, while you went to school
on the money my father left you in his will. Ha, how ironic is
that?”

It was true, Dalton Garrett not only treated
Michael like a son, he’d also left money in his will to help him
through college. In truth, it was more than enough to pay for his
education. The remainder, coupled with the small loan he’d gotten
from Stephanie’s father, meant he never had to even approach a bank
to get his start.

“It was an accident, Jerry.”

“Yeah. Well, what I’ve seen in the last two
decades, friend, was no accident. You owe me for saving your
ass.”

“Whatever you want, Jerry. I’ll pay,
Goddammit! I’ll pay. Just let us go.”

“No, fella. A bit too late for that.” He
started dousing the room with gas again. “In those twenty years, I
did a lot of things that would make your skin crawl. Hell, they
made my skin crawl. But I did them because I had to. In all that
time, the only kindness I ever found was with a woman. One woman. A
poor, but beautiful young woman from the Caribbean. You know her,
don’t you? Her name was Trista. And out of all the people in this
fucked up world of ours, a world where the fat, weak-hearted Mikey
Coles of the world rise up and make the cover Entrepreneur
Magazine, she was the only one who gave a damn about me. And you
took her away.”

Jerry trailed the gasoline from where he
stood in the middle of the room to the door before tossing away the
empty can.

“Michael,” Stephanie whispered.

He looked at her, saw defeat etched in her
face. He couldn’t meet her eyes. He just hung his head.

“I don’t want to die, Michael. I don’t want
to.” She was crying, the tears trailing down her cheeks reflecting
the weak lamp light. Through the heavy drapes on the windows,
Michael couldn’t tell if it was still light out or not.

“I hate to hear that Mrs. Cole. I truly do.
But, you see, your husband has left me with no alternative. And
believe me when I say, you’re better off this way. Your hubby here
has ruined a lot of lives. Hell, he can’t even keep his pecker in
his pants long enough for it to get scared of the dark. Trista was
just the last in a long list.”

“Trista?” Stephanie asked. “She was the black
girl in the video?”

“Yes,” the word came almost breathlessly out
of Michael’s mouth.

“You see, old pregnant Carrie knew Michael
here was a married man. She accepted that, but when faced with
seeing her suitor bed an exotic woman he’d just met while away on a
trip, forgetting to call her, hours before she admitted she was
having his child, well… She was a very fragile girl, I’m afraid.
When she found out about your little fling, she couldn’t face
bringing your child into the world all alone.”

Michael understood that this was no movie;
Jerusalem was not the clichéd madman about to divulge his master
plan. He wasn’t wasting a single word. The things he was saying
were only tools, weapons, to break Michael down further in front of
Stephanie. That’s what this had been about all along. Destroying
him. The money might have been a motivator in the beginning, but it
had never been Jerry’s true drive. Now, in these final moments, he
was killing Michael in his wife’s eyes. It was still amazing to
Michael, as he faced death, how much that hurt.

Now

Jerry could kill him—at least he had a reason
to do that—but there was no way in hell that Michael was about to
let him take Stephanie’s life. She wasn’t involved in the things
from the past. She was a innocent. There had to be a way out of
here, and Michael was going to figure it out, damn it.

It took but one look at his wife’s downward
glance to know that even if they did make it out alive, whatever
was left of their marriage was gone, dead and buried.

“You know, if you kill me, you’ll never get
the money?” Michael tried to steel his voice, but the taunt fell
flat to his own ears.

“Money? Fuck the money, you fucker! Do you
think the money means anything now? What if I just slit your
bitch’s throat,” he emphasized his words with a slitting motion,
using his thumb like a blade, “and then put a bullet between your
daughter’s eyes? Would a nice fat check make you feel any
better?”

“Of course not,” Michael blurted. He was
about to say something else, but Jerry beat him to it.
Unfortunately, not with words.

It wasn’t a knife. Or even a gun this time.
It was something much worse, and much more appropriate. A Zippo
lighter. Simple chrome. Deadly in its easy simplicity.

Michael’s wrist was killing him, the skin
chaffed almost to the bone. But it had been worth it. He was a
hair’s breath from freedom when Jerry, issuing a flick of his
thumb, popped the top on the lighter.

Before the flint was struck, he had use of
both hands. Michael’s fingers sought out the knot in the cord,
finding it quickly, only hoping it was quick enough. The knot was
proving to be a tougher row to hoe than working the loops that had
bound his hands. Still, while breath coursed through his body, he
was not about to admit defeat.

He needed time. Not much, just enough.

“What do you plan to do? Just walk away,
Jerry? There are dead bodies all over town. You can’t just walk
away from that. This isn’t the eighties. This the decade of CSI and
trace evidence.”

“If getting caught were ever a consideration
of mine, Mikey, I’d have bowed out of the game years ago.” The pad
of his thumb rolled down the spin wheel, friction on the flint
sparking a flame.

But Michael’s right cross to his temple
brought an undoubtedly brighter spark to Jerry’s eyesight. Caught
unaware, his attention more on the lighter than what he thought
were helpless, bound, victims, he was completely unprepared for the
ferocity of the attack.

The Zippo, the fire still rising three
inches, flipped from Jerry’s hand as the punch knocked into his
body which felt like the consistency of warm jelly. The Zippo
dropped to the floor a good six feet away and unfortunately, a
modest amount of gasoline covered the old wooden floor where it
landed.

Before Jerry could recover, a whoosh of
flames erupted from the spilled gasoline. The furnace flamed up
several feet high, again distracting him. Michael, who’d prepared
himself for the flare up, still flinched, but reached for the chair
of the dressing mirror, brought it up over his head and swung it
down—hard.

The wood splintered, and so did Jerry.
Finally, the bastard was down, even dazed. Michael had to move. The
fire was growing by the second, eating up the floor. By either a
need to conserve or pure oversight, Jerry had failed to splash the
bed with the flammable fuel. But that was only a temporary
reprieve. In no time at all the dried up old mattress, rotted set
of boxed springs, and petrified frame would go up like kindling in
a campfire.

A leg of the chair lay at his feet. He
scooped it up and brought it down twice, like a club, on Jerry’s
head for good measure. And then he was at Stephanie. In the throes
of his excitement, his hand-eye coordination suffered. The rope,
while as bone dry as his had been, felt slippery with oil in his
fingers and as pliable as warm clay. But his determination was not
about to be undone.

“Hurry,” she whispered, her face alive with
new hope.

“Where’s my daughter?” he asked as he worked
at the ropes. “Where’s Christal?”

“She got away. She went for help. No matter
what, she’s safe.”

Michael merely nodded, relief coursing
through him. But they weren’t out of the woods yet. As a matter of
fact, the race to the finish line had just intensified. He suddenly
had a reason to live again. A reason to not only get Stephanie
free, but to save himself as well.

“Michael, behind you!” Stephanie shouted.

He turned just in time. Jerry was on his feet
brandishing a piece of the broken chair in his hands like a
Louisville Slugger. The adrenaline must’ve really been doing a
number to his system. Everything seemed to be in slow motion,
everything except him, that was. He stepped into Jerry, raising his
left arm high, knocking away the glancing blow before it could pick
up power. Michael throttled his adversary by the neck, digging his
fingers deep into the soft flesh.

Jerry’s eyeballs bulged; the already thin air
of the smoke-filled room denied him breath. Moving as if his very
life depended on it—which, actually it did—Michael pushed the
bigger man back, ramming him into a wall. Flame closed in on both
sides. That’s when Jerry did something completely unexpected.

He dropped, limp against Michael, the fight
gone out of him. It’s a ploy, Michael’s mind screamed, but the
scream never reached the part of his brain that controlled action.
Even as his thought processes scrambled to make sense of the dead
fish flail of Jerry’s body, it instinctively weakened its attack in
compensation.

It was only a split second flick in the
armor.

But it was enough.

Michael was thrashed by a mighty blow to his
jaw, an impromptu uppercut that slammed his teeth together and
jiggled his jawbones. Knocked in a one hundred eighty degree turn,
his eyes fell to where Stephanie was just coming off the bed,
before his knees gave out and he was, once again, on the floor. If
he survived this at all, he hoped his insurance would cover the
traction he would have to endure for the rest of his life.

That was a silly thought. Even as his
forehead cracked against the wooden floor, the black acrid smoke
billowing like an angry beast inside the room, he knew the show was
over. The curtain was about to fall. The farm had been bought and
the bucket kicked.

And then Stephanie’s scream brought him back
from the brink as she attempted to dash past. Jerry had grabbed her
and was forcing her with a hand on the back of her neck into a
towering wall of flame.

With the force of a cornered lion, he leapt
from the floor and flew into Jerusalem Garret, his blood brother,
his friend to the end. The momentum of Michael’s body tore
Stephanie loose from Jerry’s grasp. She tottered but kept her
footing. Jerry and Michael, however, flew right through the flame
and disappeared from her sight.

Something in the ceiling, which the fire had
been licking like icing on a cake for several minutes, gave way and
the entire house seemed to groan, debris began falling like a
thunderstorm in April. Stephanie, seeing no alternative, fled the
room.

* * *

“Old buddy, old pal,” Michael sneered. He and
Jerry were squared off within a ring of fire, the flames reaching
from floor to ceiling. With only about six feet in which they would
not be burned to a crisp, they were close and would get much
closer.

“The hell with this.” Jerry cracked his neck,
first to the left, then to the right. “I should have put a bullet
in you from a hundred yards.”

“I’ll have to second that. But you didn’t.
You wanted to make it personal. It doesn’t get any more personal
than this.”

Michael was not trained in the martial arts.
He was, in fact, not trained in any type of coordinated fighting
style. What he knew he learned on the fly, in the cornfields, back
alleys, and city parks of his youth. His front kick landed
precisely in Jerry’s solar plexus with all the might Michael could
muster. It was a very good kick, relying on the snap of his knee
for its power and delivering its force through the flat bottom of
his foot.

Jerry was pushed backwards two feet. There’d
been only a foot and a half between him and the fire. As soon as
his body came to a stop from the kick, he screamed so loudly, so
shrilly that Michael thought that would be it.

He was mistaken.

When Jerry moved out of the raging orange
hell, his shirt and pants were aflame. Like a pyrotechnic show gone
awry, he came at Michael. Arms waving, his voice bellowing, he
still had the urge to kill, the flames hadn’t burned that away.

The speed with which his body propelled
itself only fed the fire that clung to Jerry like an ill-fitting
suit. But he cared little, it seemed. He was committed to his
actions. A fearsome sight, Michael took the slightest heartbeat to
watch, horrified. And then, all too soon, Jerry was upon him. The
stench of burning cloth and charred flesh filled his nostrils as
Michael did the only thing he could think of.

He twisted away, fell in behind Jerry and
landed a punch to his kidneys. Jerusalem’s body was covered in fire
and just that fraction of a second when Michael’s knuckles came in
contact with his body was enough to burn them, quite badly. Still
it was a powerful hit, enough to launch Jerry forward into another
high wall of flame. The whole room was now aflame with the
exception of their little ring of death, the temperature rising
higher and higher, the air thinning more and more. The smoke which
had undoubtedly found a means of escape, had decided that it no
longer wanted to flow out into the world of light and wind and sky,
but instead wanted to build up inside the house, choking off its
two lone occupants. Michael was wracked by severe coughing.